


A Search for Value

by Fallowsthorn



Category: Tron: Legacy (2010)
Genre: Character Development, Crack, Gen, Group Therapy, Humor
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-31
Updated: 2013-09-09
Packaged: 2017-12-25 04:30:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 15,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/948647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fallowsthorn/pseuds/Fallowsthorn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Takes an AU version of Legacy where everyone survived.  Flynn returned to the User world more or less unscathed, as did Sam, Quorra, Clu, Tron, and Rinzler.  ENCOM, after some frantic PR, welcomed them back with open arms - with one caveat.  Everyone has to attend group therapy in order to make sure that they're still fit to do what they like.</p><p>Which, of course, turns out to mean that seven people with wildly different moral systems, priorities, and experiences must sit in the same room for two hours without killing each other, and at the same time believably talk about their feelings without giving the game away to their therapist.</p><p>It goes about as well as you'd expect.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I Present to You the O-N-O-F-F Selector

**Author's Note:**

> So here's the story behind this one. Two years ago - maybe more by now - I saw a prompt on the Tron Kink Meme, which was along the lines of "everyone gets out of Legacy alive and has to attend group therapy, hilarity ensues." The last bonus they listed was "the therapist spills coffee/water/whatever on an electronic device and doesn't understand why everyone flips out." Well, it was my spring break at the time, and thought that was too funny to resist, and Please Don't Eat the Daises was born.
> 
> And I kept having ideas. I loved Halver and his inner voice, so I kept writing, and established an open-ended continuum. For maybe two weeks, I wrote the majority of the fic as it stands now, and for a few months after that, I fleshed out more of it. It was done with very little, if any, editing; as soon as I finished a chapter, off to press it went.
> 
> And then school got in the way, and life, and the updates dried up. I promised I would not abandon the fic, and that I would finish it, but nonetheless I couldn't do it right then. RL comes before fic, et cetera. I still worked on it; about a year after that happened (I believe), I posted again, and now it's been two years and the meme is all but dead as far as I can tell. But this keeps nagging at me. I promised I'd finish it, and I still want to, and I still work on it in between other things.
> 
> Then there's my other reason for posting this. Or rather, editing and reposting it. Primarily, since then and now I've actually been to therapy. Halver is not a therapist. Halver is not even close to a therapist, and outside of the fic I won't call him that. He is a snarky, wryly observational plot device, meant to put most of the main characters of TRON: Legacy in a room together, have them not kill each other, and force them to talk about their ~feelings. He serves that purpose well. But he is very much _not_ a therapist, and if you're looking for that kind of fic, it's not this one.
> 
> There are also a few cringeworthy moments in the original that I really need to figure out how to fix, plus some pacing issues (until the more recent chapters, two hours moves at the speed of plot, for example). And I'd like a "final" version of this fic to be archived for people to see, rather than gathering dust on the defunct meme or in my DW journal.
> 
> That said. Do not expect this to update quickly. Real life comes before fic, and other fic comes before this one, unfortunately. I may prioritize differently later, but for now that's what I got going.
> 
> Okay, holy infodump, Batman! I think that is that; showtime!

_We may define therapy as a search for value._

_-Abraham Maslow_

Halver glanced up from his laptop at the people currently filing in his door. These should be Kevin Flynn, Sam Flynn, Clu Flynn, Alan Bradley, twins Tron and Rinzler Bradley, and Quorra... her last name was illegible, which, since he was reading this off of a computer screen, Halver couldn't help but think was intentional. Christ, these people gave their kids weird names.

He gestured to the half-circle of chairs as Quorra closed the door behind her, setting his computer to the side and taking a blank notebook out of the desk drawer. He'd found writing things by hand and transcribing them to the computer later made him more accessible. He cleared his throat. "All right, this is all of you, correct?" At the nods he got, he continued. "Good. Now, I have all of your names, but not faces to attach them to, so let's go around and say our names and a little bit about ourselves, shall we?" This produced more raised eyebrows and dry looks than nods, but Halver plunged ahead regardless.

"I'm Jason Halver. You can call me whatever you like, as long as you can get me to look at you when you say it. I've been a therapist for about five years now. Most people know this, but I'm required to tell you anyway: anything said or done in here is completely confidential. As long as that door is closed, there is a bubble of confidentiality around this office. Got it?" More nods and some vague noises of assent. Not a very lively bunch, then. "We'll go clockwise," he says, and motioned to the man next to him, who paused reluctantly and then started to speak.

"I'm Clu." There was an awkward silence while Clu apparently tried to come up with something he didn't mind sharing with the class, as it were. Eventually, he said, "I'm Flynn's... son. I was the leader of... another country for a long time, before... um... I came back. Yeah." Okay, so that had been painfully dragged out, along with a poorly constructed on-the-spot lie, but maybe the rest of them would be more willing to talk.

"That's Rinzler," the man sitting two down from Clu said. Evidently the one in between was Rinzler. "He had his... tongue cut out when I - he - we were... young, and now the most he can do is growl. He's my... twin, but he's much more... aggressive... than I am. Clu was his... um." The speaker cast a wild glance at Clu, who filled in the gap with, "Military commander in the small country I told you about," which, while still clearly a lie - the speaker was even worse at it than Clu - was at least a lot smoother-sounding.

"I'm Tron," the speaker, now named, continued. "I used to... work for ENCOM, before Flynn... um, sent me to live in the small country. Yes. Um. When Clu took - I mean, became the leader, I... went into hiding, because... I didn't... I wasn't... he wasn't... I didn't agree with his methods." By now Clu was hiding his face in his hand. Rinzler hadn't moved from his cross-armed slouch, and Tron's posture was so straight he could fit right into Victorian England.

"I'm Alan. I took over for Kevin as CEO, and helped raise Sam when Kevin... went to live in that small country for twenty years." The man who had to be Kevin winced. "Ah... I had Tron and Rinzler with my late wife Lora, around 1983, and... yeah." Apparently Alan had decided the better part of truth was brevity, and at least his little speech sounded more plausible than the others'.

"I'm Sam, I'm Da- Kevin's son, although Alan raised me from the time I was seven or so. Um... I only recently found out about the... small country, and I traveled there to convince Dad to come back. Um... I met Clu, Quorra, and Rinzler there-" Sam's hand unconsciously rubbed at his upper arm, until Kevin tapped it and Sam moved it away hastily. "And I met Tron later, when Dad had... taken back... leadership of the... country. Yeah."

"I'm Kevin. I'm both Sam and Clu's father, and I took Quorra in when... ah... her parents were killed in... a war. I was CEO of ENCOM for almost a decade, before I was... held up in the... small country."

Alan snorted at this. "'Held up' for twenty years," he said, but under his breath. Kevin paused and looked at the floor. "Yeah," he said, voice rough, and the conversation moved on.

"I'm Quorra," the lone woman said shyly. "I'm native to the... small country, and everything is very different here, so I'd like to learn as much as I can. My parents were killed in the... civil war, and I lived with Flynn for the thou- I mean, the twenty cy- years, the twenty years, that he was stuck in the Outlands. Of the small country," she amended quickly.

"Well," Halver said at the end of this little speech, "I hope you're not lying to me, seeing as I can't tell anyone else about it." The silence became pointedly uncomfortable, but no one said anything, so Halver decided to call their bluff. "Why don't you tell me some more about this small country. Where did you all live? What it is called?"

There was an exchanging of glances before Kevin spoke up. "Mostly, Quorra and I lived in the half of the country that's desert-like, called the Outlands. The rest live in... Nort City. The country itself is called... Dirg."

Interesting, but this had the ring of an allegory to it, running alongside a parallel conversation that Halver wasn't a part of. After a few seconds, Halver took control of the conversation - if it could be called that - again. "Really? I've never heard of that country."

"Oh, it's very small," said Sam, in a somewhat strangled voice. "One of those smaller-than-Rhode-Island places. It's somewhere in Europe."

Halver turned to Clu. "You claim yourself to be the leader of this country. Could you find it on a map for me?"

Clu shrugged. "Ah... I don't have much of a head for geography... I'm much more of a...."

"People person," Alan filled in, much to the amusement of Tron, who barked out a harsh laugh. Halver turned to him.

"Why is that funny?"

Tron shook his head, expression cynical and bitter. "If you knew the things he's ordered done...."

"Well, tell me, then," Helver invited. "I can't help you if I don't know what's going on."

Again, the exchange of glances, a silent conversation to which Halver wasn't privy. This time, though, he caught defiance from Quorra, and something almost like... cageyness from Clu. Odd, and definitely worth pursuing.

But whatever they'd said to each other, though their semi-telepathy - Halver was starting to think maybe it _was_ telepathy - made Rinzler rumble, low in his throat. Tron glared at him, hand starting to reach over his shoulder, and Alan cleared his throat, stopping them both.

Halver intervened. “Is there anything you _can_ tell me, even allegorically?” At their surprised looks, he raised an eyebrow. “Just because I don't know whatever the rest of you do doesn't mean I'm stupid. Why don't you give me a rough history of... Dirg?”

Kevin rubbed the back of his neck. “Because we can't,” he said, answering Halver's question literally.

“Why not?”

“It's...” Kevin stopped and looked around the room. “Complicated,” the rest of them, minus Rinzler, said, more or less in unison.

“I can see that,” Halver said drily. “That's my job, though, to figure out the complicated things.” He braced his elbows on the desk and waited. He didn't have to wait long.

“Alan_1-” Tron started, then shut his mouth with a click.

Halver looked at him curiously. “What were you going to say?”

Tron glanced at Alan guiltily, then said, “Nothing,” in a small voice.

“You said 'Alan-One' like a name, or a title. Why call him that?”

Tron looked at Halver like the answer was obvious, or should be. “That... is... his desig-” was as far as he got before Rinzler's hand covered his mouth.

Faster than anyone else could react, Rinzler was on the floor, one arm twisted behind him and Tron's knee in his back. Tron's hand was clenched in an oddly-shaped claw about a foot from the back of Rinzler's neck, like he expected something to be there that wasn't. His voice was shaking with venom and rage. “Touch me again and I swear I will derezz you,” he hissed.

Clu dropped his head into his hand. Tron seemed to come back to reality a little, blinking, and noticed where he was and what he was doing. The claw his hand was in loosened, and he stared at it like he expected it to change color or something. Halver was completely lost, but Alan seemed to know what was going on, saying, “Tron-”

“I can't,” Tron cut him off, low and as harsh as his movements. “I- Users, forgive me,” he whispered, and bolted from the room.

Alan started after him, then let out a breath and turned back to Halver. “Go,” Halver said. “I don't think we're going to get anything more done today.” Alan left, walking as quickly as he could without seeming out of place.

One by one, the others left as well, although Halver noticed that none of them went the same way as Tron and Alan had. Eventually it was just Rinzler and Clu left. Halver came around his desk to help Rinzler up. “Are you all right?”

He was met with a hissing snarl from the man, and, taking the hint, backed up quickly. Rinzler stood and almost immediately settled into- Well, if Halver didn't know better, he'd call it a hunting crouch. But that was ridiculous. People weren't animals.

“Rinzler!” Clu's voice was a whipcrack, and it served the same purpose in getting Rinzler's attention. “Stand down.” Well, Halver could believe that he’d led a small country with that tone of voice.

Rinzler growled, although it was more like a harsh metallic purr than anything Halver had heard before. He flowed out of the crouch and into a sort of half-bow – clearly a subservient gesture. Clu nodded. “Good. Follow.” They left, Rinzler shadowing Clu almost literally.

Halver sighed and scrubbed at his face with both hands. Well, that had gone... interestingly. He wouldn't say _well,_ judging by how it had ended. But – there had been something – oh.

Tron had lied. When Rinzler had hissed at Halver, he'd opened his mouth most of the way, and his tongue was completely whole.

Halver made a mental note to bring coffee to subsequent meetings with these people. He had a feeling he was going to need it.


	2. Brought to You by the Letters T and R and the Number 0

_"I think everyone should sit down and write a book.  It's a lot like therapy, but less expensive."_

_-Norma McCorvey_

Two days later, Halver watched the same people walk into his office. He'd already put his computer aside and was waiting with his fingers steepled in front of his chin. A small styrofoam cup of coffee sat on his desk among the various papers, brought in by an intern earlier.

Halver made no suggestions as to how they should arrange themselves, expecting that they'd sit in mostly the same place as they had the other day. Instead, while Rinzler - or, at least, the twin wearing black and orange as opposed to the one in blue and white - stuck with Clu, and Quorra stuck with Flynn, most of them didn't seem to pay particular attention to where they were in relation to the others. Tron himself didn't even sit down, wandering over to the wall to tilt his head at Halver's degree.

"What's this?" he asked neutrally.

Halver looked up at him, startled, then figured that wherever he was actually from, small country or no, they apparently didn't have medical degrees. "It's my diploma. It tells you that I'm certified to be your psychiatrist, because I graduated from medical school majoring in that field, among other things."

"Hmm." Tron stared at the paper for a few seconds more, then turned around to face Halver. "Can it talk?"

Sam covered his eyes with his hand.

"Ah," Halver said. "No."

Tron cocked his head to the side, confused. "Then how can it tell you anything?"

"Well, you read the words printed on there."

Halver was floored by what Tron did next. He turned to Alan and said, "Alan_1, define 'words'?"

Halver opened his mouth, prepared to protest against Tron not only not knowing to read, but not even knowing what words were. Alan beat him to it. "They're... well, they're User code, but for written communication instead of building."

Halver shut his mouth, suddenly much more interested in what that meant and where this was going than in intervening.

“Hang on,” Kevin said. “I thought you knew how to read. I've seen you read before.”

Tron tore his attention away from the diploma, focusing on Kevin. “I could before. When I was... hurt, I had to... um....” He looked sidelong at Halver, then back at Kevin, apparently having trouble knowing what he wanted to say.

Luckily, pseudo-telepathy came to the rescue. Kevin's face lit up in recognition. “Oh! I get it. Okay then. Later I want to check and see if you... never mind,” he finished awkwardly, also with a glance at Halver.

Tron nodded and continued examining the certificate, then turned his back more fully to Alan and looked over his shoulder, clearly expecting something. Alan looked at him, waiting, and Tron's shoulders slumped in some sort of realization. A second later, he looked at Sam, who was closest. "What does this say?"

Sam read aloud from the diploma. "'Know all men by these presents that Jason S. Halver, having satisfactorily completed-'" He broke off when Tron started reading along with him. "'-one of the courses proscribed for grad-u-ate-ion from this' - what?" He'd noticed everyone but Clu, Rinzler, and Quorra staring at him, Halver included.

"I thought you said you couldn't read," Sam said.

"Well, I couldn't," Tron said, with the air of someone explaining that the sky was blue. "Now I can."

Blink, blink. "Holy shit," Sam croaked faintly, echoing Halver's thoughts. "How?"

"You gave me the letter sounds to go with the visual stimuli; I simply extrapolated from there that every letter shaped as such sounded the same, and guessed on the words where I was missing a few letters based on what I have heard from Alan_1 and Flynn. I think I have most of the alphabet, give or take the letters that aren't utilized often. Perhaps some other reading material could fill in the gaps...?" he tried to hint, but the rest of them weren't paying enough attention to catch it.

Alan cleared his throat several times before he could say anything. "Tron, it takes most people several years to learn to read. Not several seconds. And the word is 'graduation.'"

Tron stared at him. "Oh. Did I do it wrong?"

"Um, no," Alan said reluctantly. "You may have frightened Dr. Halver, though." He turned to Halver apologetically. "Are you all right?"

"Er... yes, I'm fine," Halver said, shaking his head to stop himself from staring at Tron. "Does this happen often?"

"Oh, no," Quorra told him, wide-eyed and innocent. "It took me a few hours because all I had was the title of the book and Flynn was out... working. It was like a cryptogram. Those are fun. I like them almost as much as Jules Verne."

At this point, Alan, Kevin, and Sam were shaking with suppressed laughter, although just how suppressed it was varied.

"Right," Halver said weakly, at a loss. "So this small country Dirg is one where everyone has a computer, even the ones that live in the desert, and yet has no idea how to read, or even what words are, despite clearly having extraordinary learning capacity? Is that about it?"

"Uh, yeah," Kevin said, suddenly uncomfortable. "It's... um, yeah, that."

Halver sighed. "Again, anything any of you say in here, to each other or to me, is completely confidential. That said, I know you're hiding something, but I'd rather have you tell me because you trust me rather than because you feel like you're required." Here he paused, and made a mental note of how they all relaxed, to some degree. Halver doubted they were doing it consciously, though, since no one spoke up. "At any rate, let's try and make this a more... productive therapeutic experience-"

He was cut off by Clu's sudden fit of laughter, poorly disguised as a fit of coughing.

"What's so funny?"

"I'm sorry, maybe your memory was wiped in the last six millicycles," Clu chortled, "but were you _here_ the first time we were?"

"Yes," Halver said patiently. _What's a millicycle?_ "That's why I'm suggesting we put some effort into making this session go better, if not more smoothly."

Cynically amused silence met this, so Halver tried another tactic. "I'd like you all to indulge in a hypothetical situation for a moment with me. Say you're all...." His gaze wandered around the office for a second before settling on his computer. "Say that you're all computer programs. Doesn't matter what kind-"

"I'd say it does!" Tron looked affronted, as did most of the rest of the room, although Kevin, Alan, and Sam looked to be on the verge of hysterics again. Oh, right. Programmers.

"All right," Halver said easily. "What kind of program would you like to be?"

"I'm a firewall," Tron said promptly.

"Okay, you're a firewall. Now," give them an external force to cooperate against, what attacked programs? "there's a virus headed your way. You're the only people who can deal with it, and you don't have time to go get help, anyway. What do you do?" Halver sat back, expecting some sort of brainstorming session that would tell him a bit more about the group's dynamics.

Which was not actually what happened.

What did happen was that Tron tensed, even sitting, and his hand started reaching over his shoulder again. "What kind of virus? Trojan, Seeker, Wyrm?"

Alan intervened before Halver had a chance to be bewildered. "Tron, you know what the word 'hypothetical' means, right?"

Tron looked at Alan like a kicked puppy. Alan sighed. "It means it's not real. We're pretending that there's an impending virus."

"...Why?" Tron asked, clearly not following this line of reasoning. Clu snorted.

"Because we're supposed to learn something about cooperation, or some such. We say what we would do in that situation, we don't actually do it."

"Oh." Tron blinked for a second, then said, "Why would I cooperate with you?" There was no malice in Tron's tone, just simple confusion, so much so that it took Halver a second to actually register the words.

By that time Alan was saying, "Maybe it's a large swarm of gridbugs and you need help with it."

"Hold on a second," Halver interjected. "I find it interesting that everyone in here is deferring to Tron about this, even though Clu seems to feel superior to him and it's been demonstrated that he doesn't know some basic things that the rest of us take for granted. Why is that?"

Again, he got a Look from Tron, and the same sky-is-blue tone of voice. "It's my job," he said, then added, "Although I guess if it was a swarm, I would need backup, so I'd get Rinzler or Clu to help. Possibly Quorra."

"Why not Alan, or Sam, or Kevin? You seem to trust them more than you do Clu or Rinzler. You certainly communicate with them more easily."

Tron seemed stuck at this, trying to explain what to him was a basic, obvious concept, and that Halver didn't - and likely wouldn't - get. Kevin stepped in to save the awkward pause.

"It's because he trusts Clu and Rinzler's fighting ability more than he does ours. And he wants to protect us more than he does them."

Halver pinched the bridge of his nose, suddenly very tired. "This has something to do with whatever you're not telling me, doesn't it?" he asked, but it wasn't really a question. He opened his eyes long enough to catch several nods, some sympathetic, some merely amused. "Marvelous."

Trying to get anything done after that was an exercise in mostly talking to himself, as what Halver could largely pry out of the group were noncommittal noises and awkward stares. At some point, he noticed that most of them were starting to look at the clock more than they were at him, and gave up. “If you really don’t want to be here, I can’t keep you,” he pointed out, to several startled looks.

Halver sighed. "All I can say is, I can't help you very much when whatever is the issue here is so intricately tied up in whatever you don't feel comfortable telling me, or it seems that way. I guess I'd like you to think a bit on your group dynamic, if you can - it's interesting that at least one of you trusts people differently based on what activity he's tasked with, and that the rest of you see it as commonplace. Other than that, I'll see you in a couple days."

He waited until everyone but Kevin was gone before letting his head fall into his hands. "Why me?" he murmured, and then jumped at a sudden hand on his shoulder.

"Hey, man, don't worry. It'll work out," Kevin told him vaguely. He headed for the door, and Halver retrieved his coffee, taking a sip of it.

Kevin turned back just as Halver was spitting out the drink in disgust. "Oh, yeah. You should probably get new coffee - by now, that one will be cold."

_Why me?_


	3. Please Don't Eat the Daisies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's title is a reference to the 1960 Doris Day film _Please Don't Eat the Daisies_ , which was inspired by/based on a book of the same name by Jean Kerr. This chapter was also the first written out of all of them.

_"I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron."_

_-Harold Bloom_

Halver fought the urge to sigh. The whole group had been sitting there for at least a half an hour, and so far they were still on square one. Currently Halver was trying to talk to Quorra, but it was hard to get anywhere when she preceded each of her answers with a glance at either Alan or Kevin to see if she could... something. Say it, Halver supposed, or figure out how to translate it from whatever the truth was to the context of “Dirg.” If he could just figure out what they were hiding...!

“Okay,” Halver said, and took a sip of his coffee. “So, what's – ack!”

He'd tried to return the Styrofoam cup to its place beside his laptop, but while looking at Quorra. This had had predictably disastrous results: that is, one expensive-looking laptop taking an impromptu coffee bath.

"Oh, damn, sorry, I - pass me those tissues, would you please?" Halver said distractedly, leaping up from his chair and lifting up the computer as the coffee attempted to flow onto his lap. He looked up when he realized that none of his patients had moved, and was startled to see them all, to a one, staring at his computer like their dog had just died. The coffee reached the front of the desk and spilled over the edge, shaking Sam somewhat out of his silent stupor. He handed Halver the tissue box absently, and Halver took it just as automatically, setting the laptop on a dry part of the desk, focused on the patients instead of the computer. He tried to be as unobtrusive as he could while he mopped up the mess, sensing that he was on the outside of whatever the rest of them were experiencing.

"How many, do you think?" Quorra's soft, quavering voice was the first thing to break the absolute quiet. Halver glanced at her, confused. How many what? But he kept his mouth shut and waited.

"Hundreds," Kevin said, in the same low, horror-filled whisper. "Maybe thousands, if it was a complicated system."

Eyes widened, and then were cast down, everyone but Kevin staring at the floor. "What do you think they were like?" asked Quorra. No one answered.

Halver was quietly surprised to find that the atmosphere in the room was familiar, somehow. Not the oops-I've-spilled-coffee-on-my-patients'-records atmosphere; the subtler, more sober one underlying it. After searching his brain for a moment for where he'd felt like this before, Halver was shocked that the analogy he came up with was the mood around a war memorial. It was the same quiet, aching hollowness that accompanied such massive loss of life - it made no sense when compared to a computer breaking, but when placed against the somber expressions and the cryptic remarks.... Suddenly the previous conversation made much more sense.

Sam darted a glance at his father. "Could we fix it, get them back?" he asked anxiously, and it dawned on Halver that they were talking about the files on his computer. But they were speaking as if each one was a person, rather than a simple computer program. Why? Halver dumped the tissues in the trash and tried to reboot the computer. It fizzled, froze, spat out some code onto a blank blue screen, made a sad little clicking and whirring noise, and refused to do anything else. He grimaced.

"May I see?" Halver glanced up; Alan was speaking to him. Deferring to the superior programmer's knowledge, he handed the computer over, to be met with almost reverent hands.

He was missing something here, of that Halver was certain.

Alan answered Sam's question after poking around a bit. "Not now," he said, and Sam's shoulders slumped. "Not like they were before. You might be able to get some of the base code back, from the original programs on here, but...." Here his eyes darted to Tron and away again, quickly enough that Sam didn't catch it. Alan sighed. "But you'd need to rewrite a lot. It might change...." He trailed off again, this time throwing a cautious - and obvious - glance at Halver. The others caught it, but if they started censoring their conversation after that, Halver couldn't tell.

"It might change them irrevocably from... where we are."

Sam nodded, looking thoughtful. Tron looked abruptly over at Clu and Rinzler, and Halver could have sworn his eyes flickered, changing from blue to a corroded brown and back again in less than half a second.

"No," Tron said, a rumble, almost like a growl, coloring the edge of his voice. It was the first time he had spoken since the session began, and they all jumped at the suddenness, turning to him. "Better to die fighting for what you believe in than to live as someone you aren't," he said, and Clu....

No one but Halver and Sam saw it, the rest of them were too focused on Tron, but when Tron added, "Even if you can't remember what you were fighting for," Clu looked sidelong at Rinzler contemplatively

There was a moment of silence, and one by one, the patients simply nodded. No words; none seemed to be needed, although for the life of him Halver couldn't figure out why. Clearly something had happened to Tron in the past, something that Clu was a part of, perhaps the cause of, and that Rinzler was connected to. But there was still an elephant in the room, something - maybe the same thing, or at least connected - sitting oppressively in the center of the circle of chairs and desk, emanating out from the laptop in Alan's hands.

But the patients seemed to become aware of Halver again, and with their absorption in the laptop went Halver's ability to eavesdrop.

"So, we shouldn't-" Kevin started.

"No," was the general chorus. Several others started and stopped sentences, usually with a glance at Halver, so the most he got was snippets like, "Is there a way to-" and "What about when Quorra's arm-" Once there was, "But then how did we get Tron-" directed at Clu, but Alan clapped his hand over Quorra's mouth before she could say any more.

Once the conversation had petered out awkwardly, Halver found himself the center of attention once more. He cleared his throat and held his hand out for the laptop, which Alan gave up a bit reluctantly. Quorra stroked its lid as it passed her by, as if Alan was a pallbearer at a funeral.

"Um... I'll call Tech Support and have them pick this up." It seemed a surreally mundane thing to say, after the mystery surrounding the previous conversation, but it was more cooperation - and more definitive character - than he'd seen out of anyone but Sam, Flynn, or Alan since the group sessions had begun, which counted as progress in Halver's book. He made the call, which took all of five minutes, and waited for the intern to come in and take the laptop before continuing.

He looked around the room, still standing, and leaned back against the bookcase behind him. "You know, I can't help you if you don't tell me the complete truth."

They jumped guiltily, in varying degrees, then tried - painfully badly - to look innocent. They couldn't have fooled a five-year-old, except for Clu.

"What do you mean?" said the aforementioned manipulator.

Halver raised an eyebrow, cracking the professional facade for a minute. "Tron's got a secret that affects you profoundly, perhaps because you were the cause. Whatever it is likely centers around his sense of self, or lack thereof. It's big enough, and important enough, that the rest of you acknowledge it as a swaying argument. For whatever reason, you're all personifying computer programs to the point that you mourn for the 'death' those you know nothing of. You - Clu - have learned to lie much better than the rest of you, leading me to wonder if there's a specific reason for that, beyond genes. Besides specifics, there's simply something you aren't telling me, and I have a feeling it could unravel a lot of this mess."

There was a beat of awed silence at the end of this monologue; then Tron said, " _Users,_ are we that obvious?" and Kevin elbowed him in the side.

"Yes," Halver told him, very dryly, and sat down at his desk, glad he drank black coffee.


	4. Second Star to the... Hang On, I Wrote This Down So I Wouldn't Forget It

_"Learning to let go begins with understanding why you've been hanging on."_

_-Terri Trespicio_

Halver turned to a fresh page in his notebook as the ENCOM group came in - the "Dirg" group, as he'd started calling them in his head. He took a sip of his coffee and very purposefully set the thermos to the side of the notebook, where he couldn't hit it with his elbow. It would probably end up in some mishap anyway, he reflected dismally. Things like that had a tendency to happen around these people.

Kevin walked up to the desk with the same sense of purpose, and after glancing behind his shoulder for support, said, "What do you know about the Grid?"

"Ah, I know that it's the basis for a video game published in the mid 1980's by ENCOM, but beyond that, it was my son that played the game, not me," Halver answered, taking off his glasses. "Why?"

Kevin opened his mouth, and then shut it again and turned to the rest of the group. They gave him varied looks of "You're on your own, man."

Kevin turned back to Halver and said frankly, "It's not just a game. It's real. Tron, Clu, Rinzler, and Quorra are all programs, brought here through use of a repurposed digitizing laser that ENCOM created in 1982." Here he stopped and regarded Halver, waiting to see what he would do.

When Halver simply looked at Kevin, and then at the rest of the group (who were currently doing their best bobblehead impressions), Kevin said, "Well?"

"Well, what?"

"Well, do you think we're telling the truth or just crazy?"

Halver sighed and pressed his lips together, trying to decide how to phrase what he had to say. "I think... you believe you're telling the truth. I think that one or more of you are using this... idea as an outlet, as a way of acting and living out scenarios that you feel you can't otherwise. I think-"

Sam threw his hands up. "See? _Now_ can we just show him?" Clearly they'd discussed, and argued about, this before marching in here.

"I don't see why we didn't just do that in the first place," Clu grumbled.

"Because the Users said not to," Tron told him promptly. Clu rolled his eyes, muttering, "Religious fanatic."

"Yeah, all right," Alan said begrudgingly. When Kevin cast him a betrayed look, he rolled his eyes, too. "You're out-voted, Kevin, four to two. Let's go."

Kevin turned back to Halver, who was not very keen on the idea of going anywhere with these people, at least not after that conversation. Kevin apparently saw this, because the next thing he said was, "Come on, man, it's just in the basement here, it's not like we're dragging you halfway across town. We can get Roy to come with us, you don't think he's insane, do you?"

Halver stood. "No, I don't, but you don't need to involve him. I'm interested to see this proof." The _"if there even is any"_ went unspoken.

The elevator ride down was spent in one of the most awkward silences Halver had ever heard. Or not-heard, whichever. Eight people in the same small space, seven of whom seemed to be almost at each other's throats and one of whom was their therapist, did not make for some very happy campers.

Finally the elevator slid to a halt and dinged, although the doors didn't open until Kevin waved his pass card in front of the reader. They all piled out with mingled feelings of relief, and both Kevin and Alan went immediately to a large contraption in the corner that Halver assumed was the aforementioned "digitizing laser," if there was such a thing.

"Tron, you'll go first," Alan said absently, poking at the console. Tron walked over to stand in front of the wall, for no apparent reason. A second glance revealed that he was facing what had to be the laser - or at least what they all thought was the laser. This could be a very, very bad idea.

Halver started forward. "Wait a minute, you can't-" he tried, but Alan had already begun. "Digitization in 3, 2, 1, and...." He hit something on the console, turning his face away, and Sam clapped his hand over Halver's eyes.

This had probably been a good idea, since Halver could see the flash even through Sam's fingers. When he could see again, Tron was gone. No cloud of smoke, no pile of dust, no blood and guts, nothing but an empty space. Halver walked forward and looked around the console and platform in disbelief. He couldn't just be _gone,_ that was impossible! People couldn't just disappear into, into _computers!_

Halver snorted when he realized what he was doing. He was taking his patients' explanation of the facts and substituting it in for whatever had actually happened. More likely this "digitizing laser" was nothing but an extremely bright light, and Tron was just humoring his father. A sad explanation, but at least a plausible one. No one had been looking for almost half a minute; Tron could very easily be hiding somewhere.

Halver could demand they go search for Tron, but it would be easier to simply pretend to go along with Alan's - and maybe Kevin's - delusion, and be gentle when it didn't work. "I'll go next," he said, but Alan overruled him.

"No, send Sam in first. You're new, you won't know what's going on. And we know the correction algorithms work for programs; it's a better idea to test them for Users with someone whose code we're familiar with. Sam, you're up."

Sam didn't seem too unhappy with being a blatant guinea pig, and Halver didn't even pretend to understand most of Alan's previous sentence. But Sam went up to the wall and the process Tron had gone through was repeated, with Halver being smart enough not to get himself blinded.

"All right, that worked," Alan said, in the resounding silence that followed. "Jason, just stand against that wall there, in the same place Tron and Sam did. Yeah, right there. You won't see the flash of light this time, but that's normal. Clu, Rinzler, and I will follow you, and then Kevin'll send Quorra through and stay here himself to make sure the Portal doesn't close on us. Got it?"

Halver had only half-listened to this, being of mostly firm mind that it wasn't real, but he nodded anyway and put his palm over his eyes again. Just in case.

"Laser aperture clear, digitization in 3, 2, 1-" Alan said, and the world froze.

Not literally. It wasn't cold. But it was like - he'd been stuck on pause for a split second. The world stuttered and stopped, and then sped up, almost. Halver could feel himself, surreally, being taken apart, and read, every atom of him, and throughout this wonderful, terrifying sense that _it was REAL-_

And the laser spat him out onto a flat metallic black island in the middle of an ocean. For a second, Halver thought it was night, before he looked up and saw that there was no moon. Scratch that, there wasn't even a _sky_. Halver stumbled away from what must be the Portal, the only thing casting light out here in the middle of nowhere, and he looked down at his clothes - tried to look down at his clothes, because they'd been replaced with a black bodysuit. The same black that the island was made out of, actually, lined with, well, lines. But light lines. He looked like a night-light. Great.

Halver glanced around and saw Sam standing a little ways off, closer to the edge of the island/tower thing that Halver would have liked to be. Sam saw him and waved him over. "Greetings, program!"

When Halver was close enough that neither of them had to shout to be heard, Sam added, "Welcome to the Grid!"

"It's real?" Halver asked. He knew he sounded useless, but he needed someone to actually confirm that, no, he wasn't hallucinating.

Sam's voice softened. "Yep. Amazing, isn't it?"

"And several other things," Halver agreed, a bit of his dry tone creeping back into his voice.

"You're luckier than I was," Sam told him, walking away from the edge. "I got picked up by a Recognizer and put in the Games within five minutes. Then again, I also had my dad telling me about the Grid and Tron and Clu since I was old enough to understand it. We'll wait 'til the rest of them get here, then give you the truth," he added.

"How long will that take?" Halver asked, surprising himself with how well he was handling this. He'd have thought he would be screaming and running in circles or something. Maybe it had to do with having to be calm when so many other people who saw him weren't.

Sam shrugged. "Maybe a half an hour, in here? Time runs a lot faster – slower - something inside a computer than it does outside. Whichever one means that thirty seconds out there is ten minutes in here. Generally we try to go in groups, especially if it's most of us, but I guess Alan wants to have you not freak out with everyone's problems and stuff."

This made about as much sense to Halver as anything else a twenty-something said to him, so he just nodded, knowing that asking for clarification would just lead to more confusion. "Where'd Tron go?" he asked instead.

"Oh, he rezzed a lightjet and went to get more batons and comm-glasses," Sam said.

"...Sorry?"

"Oh. Heh." Sam rubbed the back of his neck. "I keep forgetting you're new. We have these things called light batons, about the size of a sword hilt, and you can snap them in half to make them turn into either a one-person plane or a motorcycle. We usually keep a few around here, but not enough for everyone. Same deal with comm-glasses: they let people communicate between the worlds, through text, but we only keep a few pairs here, for safety."

Halver blinked at him. Fortunately, at this point Clu and Rinzler came through the Portal, Clu's hand on Rinzler's arm for the few seconds or so it took them both to digitize at the same time. Halver noticed with a start that Clu's circuitry was gold, while Rinzler's was orange-red. Sam's, and his own when he looked down, were both solidly bluish-white. “Why are they a different color?” Halver asked, watching Rinzler prowl away from Clu, ducking his head oddly. The intent behind this became clear when a black (was everything here black?), reflective helmet curved elegantly up to cover Rinzler's head.

Sam blinked, as if registering it for the first time. “They shouldn't be,” he muttered, eyes narrowing. “Rinzler I'd expect, but Clu....” he trailed off and looked more fully at Halver. “It means they have a different function than we do. Users are white; programs that fight for the Users – firewalls, basically anything that does what you want when you want it-” he added at Halver's questioning look “-are blue; search programs, and I assume browsers, too, are a flat whitish-green; and programs that have rebelled against the Users and serve either another program or themselves are red or orange. Clu'd be orange but he still has admin privileges. Which is a really bad idea, now that I think about it....”

“Programs: color coded for your convenience,” Halver muttered, shaking his head at Sam's blank look. “It's just something I read recently. So, basically, cool colors are good guys, warm colors are bad guys?”

“Yeah, that sounds about right. Except the colors can be faked, by Users and Quorra, and by people they've taught. So.... Oh, look, Tron's back!” Sam said, falsely bright and pretending, badly, that he wasn't changing the subject, pointing at a bright blue trail following a jet. The trail seemed to be for the purpose of locating the jet: in the murky blackness of the not-sky, the body of the jet melted and blurred.

The jet dived for the empty space on the platform, circling once or twice to slow its speed, but demolishing itself around twenty feet from the ground, Tron slipping the baton into a holster and rolling in a smooth, practiced motion. He used the momentum from the fall to run forward, unsheathing a whirring circle from his back and throwing it at Rinzler.

Rinzler ducked under the circle – was that a _frisbee?_ \- and straightened in almost the same motion, taking his own frisbee from his back. Halver watched all of this with bewilderment and growing trepidation. Frisbees or not, the two were throwing them with what seemed like near-lethal force. Halver didn't know if programs could get concussions, but whatever would happen if the two hit each other probably wasn't good. And Tron – the one with blue circuitry – had just thrown his frisbee/weapon into the ocean.

Except... Halver guessed it must be a frisbee/weapon/boomerang, because it came arcing back around to Tron, repelling Rinzler's frisbee/weapon, which also boomeranged back into the other... program's hand.

Halver turned to Sam. “Um, is this dangerous? What's going on?”

Sam turned to him from where he was watching Tron and Rinzler fight, surprised. “Oh, yeah, sure it's dangerous, but it's more of a bad idea for us to try to intervene that to just wait until Alan shows up.” He seemed unconcerned with the fact that the aforementioned programs were trying to hurt or kill each other, and that they were trying to accomplish it with frisbee/weapon/boomerangs. Sam, turning back to the battle, added, “And those are lightdiscs they're fighting with, if you're wondering. You don't have one yet, because it's your first visit here, but we'll have the Sirens fit you with one, or we'll just find a blank one, once we get into the City.”

“'Nort' City?” Halver asked wryly. He'd seen the plate-like ring on Sam's back before, and felt that he himself was missing one, but he hadn't really noticed either fact until now.

Sam twisted around and grinned at him. “Tron City. Dad built this Grid, so he got to name things whatever he wanted. Tron was one of the first programs to live here, and he helped defeat the MCP and expose Ed Dillenger.”

Halver nodded, then his attention snapped to the fighting pair suddenly as Rinzler let out a harsh cry. Tron had caught him across the thigh, and Rinzler was now missing a large chunk of his leg. The latter lashed out savagely, unexpectedly dissolving Tron's right hand into sequin-like shining things.

“Shouldn't we stop them?” Halver asked anxiously. Sparring was one thing; crippling each other was another matter entirely. But Sam looked completely calm, and when Halver glanced over, Clu did, too.

Sam raised an eyebrow, not taking his eyes off the fight. “Look, if you have any great ideas, speak up now, but those two are the most proficient warriors on the Grid, in the Games and out. They do this so often that I think if one of them were to win, the other one wouldn't know what to do with himself. And they're at exactly the same level of fighting ability. Everything else is just luck.”

Indeed, Tron seemed to be using his singular left hand with no visible difficulty, and while Rinzler had to compensate a bit more for his own wound, he was holding his own easily. There was no sign of blood, and if either of them were in pain, neither showed it.

They were gradually working their way to the edge of the platform, although they moved around each other and switched positions often enough that Halver didn't think either of them knew it. He opened his mouth to say something, but the programs were too far away to hear him. The Portal flared, and Alan's voice cracked across the platform. Silhouetted against the Portal's light, he looked dramatically like some sort of avenging angel.

“Tron!”

Tron looked over and immediately stopped fighting, making Halver grateful for Clu's almost overlapping, “Rinzler!” that stopped said program from killing Tron. Both programs replaced their lightdiscs on their backs and loped over to their respective... Halver didn't want to say _masters,_ but that was the first word his mind came up with, which was probably a bad sign. Clu, at any rate, was very obviously Rinzler's master, but Tron... didn't have the same air of subservience about him. He served, clearly, but within reason and parameters. Rinzler looked and acted like Clu's word was the only parameter he had.

It was a sobering thought.

Halver was jerked back to reality by Alan handing him a baton and something that resembled sunglasses. Glancing around, Alan discovered they were apparently for much the same purpose: the others were fitting them over their eyes. This didn't seem very practical, seeing as everything was, evidently, entirely black.

Shrugging, he did so as well, and then almost jumped out of his skin when text appeared over his surroundings. _Testing, testing, 1 2 3,_ it said.

Sam grinned. “Hey, Dad, got you bright and clear.”

As the glasses translated Sam's words into text, the display shrank until it took up a quarter of the space it had before. Halver could see what his face was pointing at – the glasses didn't seem to be tinted – but when he flicked his eyes over to the text and looked at it for long enough, it enlarged again, enough for him to read Kevin's _Took you long enough. Listen, don't go sightseeing or anything. This isn't the most interesting thing in the world up here, and it would be good if you all came back in one piece. Tron, you do not need to patrol, I promise they can handle it themselves. Clu, if you try anything, I will personally derezz you from up here._

Clu rolled his eyes. “Yes, mother hen.” His circuitry flickered, though, before resuming a slightly bluer shade of gold. His glare dared them to say anything about it.

Alan interceded before the conversation could descend into bickering, taking the role of responsible adult. “We'll just get Halver a disc and fill him in on... on what he's missing. It shouldn't take more than half an hour on your end, and you can watch the conversation and fill in any gaps.”

_'Kay. See you outside._

“See you,” Alan said, then turned his attention the rest of the group. Halver could see the words continuing to update in the corner of his vision, but after focusing on something else for a couple seconds, he found he could ignore it easily enough. He refocused on Alan as the latter began giving out instructions and orders. “We stick close to Jason on the flight over. If he does well, we can spread out on the way back, but I want no injuries and no light-trails, got it? Tron, come here a second.” Tron dutifully turned his back to Alan, who unhooked Tron's disc and tapped a few things on it, fixing several lines of flashing red... code, that had to be code. Odd. When Alan replaced Tron's disc, it whirred for a second, and then his right hand sort of... slithered back into existence.

...That wasn't weird at all....

When Alan opened his palm, there was a small moth sitting in it. It fluttered, and then took off drunkenly with a few encouraging breaths from Alan. Halver blinked, and then had to suppress a grin. Debugging. Clever.

The moth made its looping way over to Rinzler, whom Clu must have debugged himself, which didn't turn out be a very smart lifestyle choice for the moth. Rinzler batted at it a few times, interested, and when it tuned in and tried to escape, he pounced on it, capturing it between his palms and looking for all the world like an overgrown housecat. The effect was compounded when he opened his hands and seemed disappointed – although Halver couldn't really tell, since his helmet was still on – when all that was left of the moth was a small pile of sequin-like objects. Pixels? Halver had no idea, but it seemed likely as anything else.

Leaving Clu to deal with Rinzler, Alan shook his head and began again. “Sam and Tron will go first again, they're the more agile fliers and will be able to help if something goes wrong. Jason, you'll rezz your jet after them, and once you're stable, the rest of us will follow. By that time, Quorra ought to be here, but if she's not, Kevin, tell her to just join us. We'll leave a baton behind for her, and we won't be that far ahead. Barrel roll or dive-and-recover means 'I'm okay,' tight circle means 'I need to land immediately,' and... I think we'll know if something is seriously wrong, but if the problem is with you instead of the plane, move the baton out from where it's locked in and one of us will catch you.” Alan displayed no discomfort in talking to people both present and not, candidly accepting a baton from Tron. Halver took one with a little more apprehension. What did Alan mean, _rezz your jet?_ He didn't mean doing the opposite of what Tron had when the program had gotten here, did he?

Halver heart sank when he saw Sam sprinting for the edge of the platform, jumping off and impossibly hanging in the air for a split second before the lightjet “rezzed” around him, which apparently meant that all of the individual parts were drawn, filled in, and made real in a process that looked like so many things could go wrong with it, all at once. He turned to Alan with some disbelief. “And you're sure I have to jump off a cliff for this to work,” Halver said, deadpan.

“Yeah,” Alan told him gently. Or how he thought was gently. It sounded a bit more towards the gleeful end of the scale. “Otherwise these things'll automatically rezz a lightcycle – a motorcycle, essentially – instead. Which is great in the city but not so much out here.”

“Yeah,” Halver agreed nervously, wiping his suddenly sweaty palms on his... well, he'd forgotten and thought they were jeans, but whatever this material was. “Okay. No big deal. Just jumping off a cliff.”

“Hey,” Alan said, and this time he actually did sound gentle. Mostly. “Don't worry. It's not as hard as it looks. What you want to do is break the baton open at the same time you jump. If you can't get it, twist it like you're opening a water bottle. Hold the halves about two or three feet apart, and the construct should sense how high up you are and snap them into the right place for a lightjet.”

“'Should'?” Halver echoed, not convinced.

“Well, that's why Sam and Tron are up there,” Alan said, which, considering the two were currently performing aerial acrobatics and not paying much attention whatsoever, wasn't the most reassuring statement in the world. “Trust me, the hardest part is actually getting in the air. The rest of it's pretty intuitive. Go!”

Halver jumped at the sharp sound and ran for the edge of the platform without stopping to think. If he did that, they'd never get anywhere.

He jumped a little too soon and snapped the baton open – like breaking a pencil, it made him worry he would break the mechanism, too – before he was all the way over the ocean. Before he had time to worry, the jet was forcing the baton halves, now steering controls, on either side of a form-fitting leathery-yet-metallic (everything here was metallic, too, not just black) steering column thing. Or at least, what Halver thought should be called a steering column, he had no idea was it actually was. The contours of the jet shoved his body into alignment, and he was in the air before his brain got the message to the rest of him to panic.

Alan had been right; flying was mostly intuitive. It seemed to rely much more on where he shifted his weight than on the various switches and levers that he'd seen in commercial airlines; perhaps because there was no need for takeoff or landing.

Remembering the signals Alan had talked about, Halver dipped down in the air, then gained back the altitude, before joining Sam and Tron in flying lazy circles around the Portal beam.

Alan rezzed his own jet a few seconds later, followed shortly by Clu and Rinzler, all of them giving the “OK” sign. Clu and Rinzler's jets were different in that they were the color of the programs' circuitry; given what else he'd learned about the Grid, that shouldn't surprise him as much as it did.

After circling once, Alan's jet – someone had thoughtfully provided an identifier along with whatever targeting system this jet had – straightened out and headed towards the cityscape on the horizon. The rest of them followed, keeping close to Halver in case of trouble.

A few minutes went by in silence, then Clu's voice crackled over the communications line the jets were evidently equipped with. “You know, Halver, you can take off the glasses.” His words appeared on the windshield in front of Halver, in much the same way Kevin's had on the glasses. Halver risked taking his hand off the baton half to tear the glasses off his face and deposit them on the dashboard-like area in front of him. They were handy, but they were also somewhat of a pain.

Sam exhaled, a blast of staticky sound that the screen registered as simply _*sigh*_. “I guess we should tell you tell the actual history of this place, then,” he said reluctantly.

“Yes, let's start with that,” Halver agreed.

There was a brief silence before Tron was delegated the task of storyteller, being the one there whose relevant memory went back the farthest. He told Halver of his capture by, and subsequent defeat of, the MCP, along with Ram, Kevin, and Yori. Kevin occasionally added input, but the line was mostly silent as Tron spoke.

By the time he'd finished his tale, they were flying over flat, barren land: probably the “deserty area” that Quorra had called the Outlands. Quorra had also joined them part-way through Tron's monologue, but had remained respectfully silent, so Halver only noticed the extra jet in their entourage when he looked around again.

“...and eventually Flynn came back,” Tron continued somberly. “He said that he owned ENCOM – he was our User, now. And he said he was making a new civilization, that-” Tron broke off, and Kevin picked up the sentence. Halver could almost hear the rough nostalgia in his voice, even though his words were simply text.

_-that anyone who wanted to come could, provided they let me make a copy of them so they could continue their functions at ENCOM. Tron was the only one who wasn't duplicated._

Here Alan interjected: “No, at that point we'd ended up writing an entirely new firewall. Tron was still around because of – well, everyone _thought_ it was Kevin's nostalgia.”

Kevin _*cough*_ ed onscreen, then continued. _I'd spent a while building another digitizing laser, and a compatible console, so that I could access the Grid from the arcade. ENCOM still had the same laser, but since we never zapped anyone with it-_

“Wonder why _that_ was,” Alan muttered. It showed up as very small text on the screen, and Kevin went on, seemingly oblivious. Halver made a mental note of Alan's discontent.

_-after a few years, the company couldn't find any real commercial use for it and focused more on home computing. Because of the time dilation, I was able to spend enough time working on both the company and the Grid-_

“Like hell you were!” Alan, Clu, and Sam said simultaneously, and then seemed shocked that they'd had the same idea at the same time. The silence that followed certainly seemed to say so. Halver intervened before Kevin could speak any more.

“It sounds like none of you felt as if Kevin was paying as much attention to you as you were to him.”

A pause, then Sam, in his best why-are-you-being-so-unbelievably-stupid voice, said, “He was gone. For. Twenty. Years. We thought he was _dead._ ”

_Hey, it wasn't my fault!_ Kevin protested. _Ask Mr. Military Coup over there!_

Halver saw Clu's jet circuits pulse in anger, and the gold program swerved away from the formation. “Oh, so I suppose it was 'my fault' that you were obsessed with those Isos?” Clu's voice almost writhed with sarcastic anger.

“Hey, just because you were _jealous_ , it didn't give you the right to massacre my _people_!” Quorra shot back.

“Whoa, whoa, wait, wait a minute,” Halver said hastily. “Who said anything about killing people? I knew Quorra was an orphan, but... an entire people?”

There was a moment of silence before Tron sighed. It was soft, more of an exhalation than anything, but suddenly Tron sounded much, much older. “That's the part you don't know,” he said, just as quietly. “After every era of prosperity comes the inevitable.”

Clu's circuits dimmed a bit and he moved back into the group. No one commented. They were listening to Tron, who'd been once again handed the talking stick.

“After the Grid had been set up, and most of the gridbugs had been eradicated, a new kind of program showed up. Keep in mind that the Grid was a closed system then; it still doesn't have access to any other system, we're still rebuilding. No User had written them; it was almost as if they'd simply... appeared. We still have no explanation for it.

“Flynn... Flynn became captivated by them. He called them 'the Miracle,' wanted to show them off to the User world. But in arranging things with them, he neglected the rest of the Grid. Clu became... irrational. He said that the Isos – Isomorphic Algorithms – were just another kind of bug, that they were too unpredictable, too – too _User_ to be able to live in the 'perfect system'. He waited until Flynn left for the User world to organize a coup, rectifying – reprogramming – the Black Guards to serve him instead of the Users. When Flynn came back, he ambushed both of us. I tried to protect Flynn. He ran. I....” Tron choked on his words for a second, belying his otherwise calm tone. “Clu cut my throat and used my Sleep mode to add another program's code, one of his Black Guard's, to mine.”

“Rinzler's,” Halver said, on a hunch.

“Rinzler's,” Tron confirmed. “Flynn hid in the Outlands with Quorra, the last remaining Iso after... after – Clu – I-” Tron took a breath. “After the rest were killed.”

“World War Two all over again,” Sam murmured, in the resulting silence. “Ain't people great?”

Kevin picked up the story then. _It was only a few hours until the Portal closed, trapping me in the Grid. Anything I tried in order to hurt Clu's efforts only made him stronger – he simply rectified any programs I wrote. I had to keep away from him and his Black Guard, because my disc contained the correction algorithms needed to operate the Portal safely. I had no aerial transport, and as far as I knew, Clu had Guards waiting at the Portal cycle in and cycle out._

“You never went back for Tron?” Halver asked.

Kevin hesitated. _I thought he was dead,_ he said at last. _I... Tron, I'm so sorry, man. I thought Clu'd derezzed you._ The accusation in his voice was clear, even without sound.

Clu snorted. “Why would I do that? More to the point, _how?_ It's not for nothing that Tron's head of security. Once the element of surprise – and several of my best fighters, may I add – were lost, anything keeping Tron from doing whatever he liked would have amounted to token resistance. So I took care of the problem before it appeared.”

Tron said nothing, but looped out of the front of the formation and climbed higher, trying to get a lock on Clu with his targeting system. Clu dodged to the side, Rinzler following, and the latter's soft, deadly growl filled the comm line. And the screen, since the speech-to-text didn't know any other way to translate it than, “Rrrrrr....”

Tron dropped back, but, seeing no way to shoot Clu and Rinzler out of the sky without putting the rest of them at risk, eventually swooped back in to his former position, deliberately flying too close to Clu. Rinzler's jet circuits brightened warningly, but he quit growling when they were all flying in more or less the same places they had to begin with.

Alan said nothing, only a tight, “Follow me, I'll take us to the Arena. There should be wiped discs there, if not Sirens,” as they entered the outskirts of the City. He turned and dived lower, the rest of them following him like a flock of birds. Black birds with light-up lines on them. Okay, so it wasn't the best analogy.

Halver kept silent, trying to incorporate everything he knew now with the people he'd become familiar with in the last week. Tron, a computer program, had defeated one evil dictator and fallen victim to another, who was currently flying next to Halver. On Halver's other side was some sort of self-generating program, the rest of whom had all been killed by said evil dictator. Kevin Flynn, who had created this computerized world for no other apparent purpose than that it was cool, was sitting around in the User world, waiting for them to show up again. Rinzler had been smooshed into Tron, as far as Halver could tell, and had been unsmooshed with Clu's downfall. How had that happened, anyway? And where did Sam and Alan enter into it?

And there was something else that Halver couldn't make add up right: the times. Sam had said that it would take about half an hour for the rest of the group to show up, which, while a tad overestimating, wasn't that far off. And yet Alan had told Kevin that it only ought to take about a half an hour on “his end” for them to come back. Whichever way he did the math, they'd been in the air for more than half an hour, and they weren't even there yet, wherever “there” was. Kevin had said something about “time dilation,” though....

Halver cleared his throat, and a few of the jets shuddered as their occupants started. Halver realized guiltily that they'd settled into silence, then forged on. “I think I'm missing something regarded time. Does it pass less quickly in here than it does out there?”

“Yeah,” Alan said. He'd taken up the title of Explainer-In-Chief. That, or it had been shoved onto him. “A year in here – called a cycle – is about a week in the outside world.”

Halver did the rough math for twenty years' absence, then swallowed hard. “That means Kevin was trapped in here for....”

_Over a thousand years,_ Kevin said.

There was a brief pause, then Alan said, “Okay, we're coming to the arena. What you need to do is get close enough to the ground that you can feel the jet start to flicker, and then force the baton halves out of where they are now. It'll hurt, but you'll be okay, even if you just fall. Try to duck your head and roll, though. If you panic, hold the halves back where they were, and it should rezz a lightcycle around you.”

Sam and Tron, being in the lead, were the first to derezz their jets and drop to the ground below, rolling and using their momentum to their advantage. Clu and Rinzler were next, and were more efficient than fancy, but they got to the ground safely. Halver was starting to think this wouldn't be so hard, after all. Taking off hadn't been, had it?

Five minutes later, Halver could see Sam's reflection offering him a hand up in the glassy black floor of the arena. “Ow,” he told it, then pushed himself up and turned around, taking the proffered help. He could see Clu snickering into his hand. Tron looked concerned at Halver's graceless landing, and Rinzler's expression was still unreadable, being hidden behind his helmet.

“You okay?” Sam asked, unable to hide a small smile. It was good-natured, though, and had an element of _been there, done that_ to it, so Halver put a hand on his hip and twisted around, feeling his muscles protest. He winced, then said, “Yeah, I'll be fine. I'll just have some interesting bruises in the morning, is all.” He looked down and was surprised to find the light baton, now whole, still in his hand. The glasses were gone, though, when he looked around. They must have derezzed when he hit the ground, or something.

Sam's smile turned into a grin. “No, you won't. Come on!” He waved at Alan and Quorra, who'd landed a ways away, and then tugged Halver towards the side of the arena, Halver and his back protesting at the rough treatment.

Alan and Quorra caught up with them as Sam was opening a door that Halver was reasonably sure hadn't been there before, or at least hadn't had seams. It opened onto a cavernous room – upon closer inspection, an armory.

Sam stepped inside to make room for the others, causing lights to come on automatically. They were the same circuits that outlined much of the Grid, and Halver was again surprised at how much they illuminated. Halver, seeing nothing else to do with it, slipped the baton he was still holding in a pile of similar ones on a table.

“Tron, you wanna do the honors?” Sam asked. Tron nodded at him vaguely and, walking over to the side of the room, selected a blank white disc from an array of them on a table. It lit up at Tron's touch, but it wasn't the same white light of Halver's and the other Users' circuits, Halver noticed. It was flatter, almost... emptier. Which was fitting, really, considering what it was for.

Halver turned around to let Tron hook the disc onto his back. He wasn't expecting much difference beyond an extra couple ounces of weight, so he was startled when he physically felt the disc... sync, he supposed, up to him. Suddenly, there was so much more room to think, and plan, and remember things. _Oh,_ he thought, feeling slightly foolish, “it's a memory card.”

Both Sam and Alan laughed in recognition at Halver's confusion and then startled shake of the head. “Don't worry,” Alan said. Sam added, “You'll get used to it. And then you'll get back and you won't be able to remember where you put your keys, your lunch, your pants, the presentation you were supposed to give that afternoon....” The last items made Halver think dryly that Sam was speaking from personal experience on this one. Although “pants” was a bit worrisome.

Halver turned back around fully, ignoring Sam's quietly continuing, and increasing outlandish, list of things he claimed to have forgotten by coming back from the Grid. He stopped talking when Halver started, though. “Would you like to continue our session here, or in the... User world?” It took effort not to make himself say “real world.” Both were real, as fantastic as that sounded. “If it's here, we need to find some way to include Kevin.”

Sam and Alan looked at each other, then at the assembled programs, all of whom looked more relaxed than Halver had ever seen them (although Quorra was still putting several people between her and Clu).

“There's a control room at the top of the arena. It has a board that can be used the same way as the glasses,” Sam said, sounding a bit reluctant to have to continue talking about _feelings_ as opposed to having fun on the Grid.

Alan started to lead the way to the back of the room, then remembered something. “Oh! Jason, that fall looked like it hurt. If you give me your disc for a minute, I'll show you something else that's pretty neat about the Grid.”

Halver, not quite sure how these two statements were connected, nonetheless reached over his shoulder and unhooked his disc. The feeling of having more space in his head diminished, but it didn't go away; however, he found that he now had to concentrate more to remember things from more than a few minutes ago. Or – not concentrate _more,_ but simply concentrate at all; apparently lightdiscs gave their owners perfect recall. Handy, but deceptive.

Alan, with a few seemingly random pokes at Halver's disc, brought up a 3D model of Halver's face. Another few pokes revealed a double-helix of code that was at once reminiscent of both tenth-grade biology and _The Matrix._ Alan ran some sort of diagnostic, stopping at the bits of code that were flashing red and retyping a few words at each spot. It took him longer with Halver than it had to do the same thing with Tron's code, despite the seriousness of Tron's injury, perhaps because Tron's was more basic, appearing only as a one-dimensional wall of text.

Halver had been half-expecting his bruises to magically disappear at Alan's coding; when this failed to happen, he shot the other man a raised eyebrow. Alan motioned for him to turn around, and when Halver did, and let the disc sync up again, he felt the throbbing pain in his sides, chest, and legs drain away. He straightened up, taking a deep breath and suddenly feeling better than he had in years. He twisted around again, feeling his back pop. Alan was watching his with amusement. “Just wait for a rainstorm,” was all he said before leading the way to a small hexagonal elevator in the back of the room.

They went up in two and threes, the blue- and white-circuited of them bookending Clu and Rinzler, whom Halver now had much more reason to be very wary of. He promptly trampled on the feeling before it could grow into actual fear. Being scared wouldn't accomplish anything, no matter how much reason there was for it.

Finally, they were all sitting in more or less a circle, with the glass board that Sam had awakened and designated Kevin's communication device making up a large chunk of it. Since there was exactly one chair and several pillows, they were all sitting on the floor, the pillows under those who'd claimed them or managed to get them out of the others. A slight pillow war, and then a very competitive pillow war, had ensued before Quorra had broken it up with the realization that pelting one's enemy with pillows was a little counterproductive when one's ammunition was also one's spoils.

_Now what?_ Kevin asked, once the board had been proved to be working and everyone was sitting and looking at Halver.

“Now,” Halver said, firmly, “we talk.”


	5. Kindergarten Etiquette, or, Kittens Make Everything Better

_"Smile.  It's free therapy."_

_-Douglas Horton_

Halver shifted his weight, feeling the disc on his back protest at the attempt to describe it as flexible. The disc _connected_ to his back. Halver had a feeling that the sheer impossibility of the Grid would catch up to him later, but for now, it was content to sit around in the extra space in his head – the _extra space_ in his _head,_ what the _hell_ \- and lie in wait.

Which was useful, if probably not healthy, because he was about to hold the fourth group session of ENCOM's finest inside of said Grid, half of whom had been alive for over a thousand subjective years and most of whom had been through what was, for all intents and purposes, a War World II allegory.

So, no pressure.

“Why don't you continue the story of the Grid, Clu?” Halver suggested. Clu didn't look terribly happy with this idea, but no one else jumped in to save him, so he reluctantly started talking. A few words in, Halver realized that Clu's version of events wasn't likely to go over well with anyone but Rinzler. He didn't say anything, though. The dissonance might prove insightful.

“Fine. Flynn was hiding in the Outlands like a coward, I was getting closer every cycle to amassing my army and capturing Flynn's disc, when who should access the Grid but a group of _Users._ They called themselves, quaintly, 'Flynn Lives': he had, of course, vanished from the User world and was presumed to be dead. Fortunately, I was able to convince them to connect the arcade to Alan's pager – how, I don't know, but I sent the page and let the blind stupidity inherent in all Users do the rest. Et voila-” Clu turned and gave a mocking half-bow in Sam's direction. “- _you_ showed up.”

“He put me in the Games and Quorra broke me out,” Sam said hastily, with a worried glance at Alan, whose teeth were grinding so tightly together it seemed like they should creak. “We escaped to Dad's hideout in the Outlands, and he filled me in on what had happened and why he'd been g- why he'd been trapped. His solution was to sit around and do nothing-”

_Remove ourselves from the equation,_ Kevin interjected.

“-so I....” Quorra, who'd picked up the narrative, coughed. “... _helped_ Sam get back the the City, to find... to find a lightjet and stop Clu from getting out. Sam left first, but it turned out Clu was able to track the lightcycle he'd left on, so Flynn and I ended up following him.”

There was a drawn-out, awkward silence when Quorra finished talking but no one else spoke up. Eventually Kevin typed, _My disc was stolen at the End of Line club, when Clu found us talking with Zuse. Quorra remembered him as a neutral program with a lot of influence, and thought he might help. Clu got my disc after that, probably by derezzing Zuse and Gem, and we hijacked a Solar Sailor – sort of like a train, only very high up – to get to the Portal, or at least find lightjets._

Another long pause, and then Sam said flatly, “We got Dad's disc back and got out. Clu accidentally got transported with us, and lost a lot of his motivation when he saw the User world. The rectified programs got re-rectified or derezzed. Unicorns and rainbows danced and sang songs. The end.”

This came as such an abrupt change from the previous, more animated conversation that Halver blinked in shock before catching himself. “What happened to all the detail?”

Sam shrugged and resolutely stayed silent. Halver turned to Clu. “After all that effort and fight, you just gave up? Took one look at the User world, turned right back around and went home?” Clu's shoulders tightened a fraction, but his gaze stayed locked on the wall and his mouth stayed shut.

“I can answer that question,” Tron said softly. The group turned to him, almost as one, but Tron kept looking straight at Halver – the only one of them that seemed comfortable in doing so. “You want to know why Rinzler can't talk?”

Halver nodded calmly, and Tron's hands went to his throat, passing over the material of his bodysuit and derezzing the fabric where he touched it. When he took his hands away and tilted his head up, Halver could see a thick knot of scar tissue in a line spanning Tron's twin jugular veins, or where they would be, if he had them. Unlike in the User world, it wasn't just pink, raw-looking flesh. The scar literally gleamed with code, patches of it appearing and disappearing as Tron moved his head. Most of it was an angry, irritated red, but it seemed to be mostly superficial damage; even through that, Halver could see the underlying, flickering blue of Tron's source code.

Tron touched his throat again lightly, rezzing the bodysuit back over it. From a distance, it was impossible to tell there was a scar unless one already knew it was there, which Halver suspected was what Tron had been going for. “It's the scar Clu gave me, when he rectified me into Rinzler,” Tron said, still and steady into the dead silence. It was like dropping a stone into the surface of a pool of water. “He used it to access my code and corrupt it. When Rinzler and I were separated, he kept the programming, and I kept the scar.”

“Is it fixable?” Halver asked levelly. Tron shot him a strange look, half dark and half wry.

“Yes,” he said simply. “It's an open point in my programming. It probably wouldn't be difficult for any User to fix.”

“Then why do you keep it?” was Halver's next, logical question. “If it's an open point, isn't that detrimental?”

Tron blinked at him. “It is a reminder,” he said solemnly, looking down.

“Of what?”

“Of my failure. I failed to protect the Isos. I failed to resist Clu. I failed to serve the Users.”

“But those weren't your fault!” It wasn't Halver who had spoken; it was Alan, looking alternatively like he wanted to protect Tron and kill Clu in a variety of unusual and painful ways. Tron's head shot up and he looked at Alan as if Alan had done something akin to landing on Earth in a spaceship and declaring himself from the planet Frumba. It worried Halver slightly that these were the comparisons his brain was coming up with, but it worried him a lot more that the concept of “there are some things in life you can't control” was one Tron seemed to have never heard of before.

Tron's eyes flicked towards Clu, and then to Rinzler, who was sitting next to Clu peacefully, breath humming. Clu raised his eyebrows expectantly. “And?” he drawled. “How does this, disregarding your mental problems, relate to my suddenly not wanting to conquer the User world?”

“You have mental problems, too, or you wouldn't be here,” Alan shot back, still feeling protective.

“I'll say he does,” Sam and Quorra muttered simultaneously, at the same time Kevin said, _Of course he does, he was an evil dictator._ Clu seemed to take no notice of any of this, but when the group's attention turned back to Halver, the therapist saw him read the screen again and flinch slightly, circuitry flickering to deep gold and then back to the tarnished blue-gold it was currently.

“How does it relate, Clu?” Halver asked, trying to get the group back on track. “You were there, you must have some idea.”

Clu huffed out a short breath in exasperation, but answered all the same. “I used the scar - the wound - as an easy access point to Tron's code to reprogram him into Rinzler. I had to leave most of Tron's original code alone, though, and build on top of it, which damaged his vocal functions to the point you see in Rinzler, there.” Clu waved a hand at said program, who tilted his head slightly in acknowledgment. “I had to keep it open enough that I could fix small glitches as they cropped up, as well as keep a lid on Tron, who had a nasty habit of trying to throw off the 'Rinzler' programming every so often. At the same time, I had to keep it closed enough not to impair Rinzler. The balance worked.” He paused momentarily, and suddenly a spot on the floor in the middle of the circle became fascinating. “Here,” Clu added.

Halver stared at him blankly before connecting the dots. Clu had made it to the User world, and presumably taken Rinzler/Tron with him, because otherwise how would he know that the wound was only... closed... enough...?

Oh. _Oh._ Well, that explained an awful lot.

Sensing that Halver had gotten it, or perhaps just assuming he had, Kevin said, _We only barely got him back into the Grid on time. I put the entire Grid into an effective lockdown, and Sam called Alan and got him to come down there, and – what_ did _you tell him?_

Sam's lips twitched. “'Alan, come here, Tron is dying and you're the only one who can save him.' And then I hung up. To get him to ignore the blood all over the floor and get into the Grid...?” The twitch became a full-blown smirk. “Well, it wasn't funny at the time, but I think I said-”

“'Hurry up and stand right there,'” Alan finished drily. “Although I probably wouldn't have believed him if he'd just told me, even if the blood was...” Alan searched for an appropriate word and settled on, “disconcerting.” Judging by the snort Quorra gave at this, it had been a lot more than disconcerting.

Alan continued, ignoring her. “Tron was – well, I guess Rinzler was – no, Tron – you know what? Tronzler was pretty close to derezzing from blood loss at that point, and I was the only one able to access his programming through his disc, which was what really needed to happen in order to save him. The only rundown I'd gotten of what had happened was, 'Kevin's alive, this is the Grid, you're inside a computer, Tron is dying,' and I think I was in shock anyway. I dumped all of Rinzler's programming in another file, because I didn't know if it was important, only that I hadn't put it there and it was in the way. I bridged the holes in Tron's programming, but he stopped me from smoothing out that scar. At the end of it, we had Tron and Rinzler as separate programs, Rinzler was out cold, and Clu was tied up with his disc in Kevin's hands.”

“...And then?” Halver prompted.

Alan shrugged. “I felt there should be some explanation of – well, of everything, before we killed anyone. So I got it, and by that time both Tron and Rinzler had gone into recharge – fallen asleep,” he added, for Halver's benefit. “We knocked our heads together until we came up with something that didn't involve rectifying more people, including Clu. Mostly... uh.” Alan looked around and gestured in the same way, to mean everything. “This.”

Halver nodded. There still seemed to be a few things missing, but at least they weren't glaringly obvious anymore. Except for one thing.... “Who's Ram?”

“What?” Tron said, startled. Some random letters appeared on the screen, presumably from where Kevin had accidentally hit the keyboard, and then he echoed Tron.

Halver shrugged, as if it was no big deal. “When you were telling me about the MCP, you mentioned a program-” _Still_ couldn't believe he was saying that. “-named Ram. But he disappeared halfway through, and you didn't say anything else about him. What happened?”

Halver could have been imagining it. After all, what Kevin was saying was just words on a screen. There was no sound, no voice accompanying them. But as he read Kevin's answer, it, and the surrounding silence, seemed to grow heavy and dead.

_Ram didn't make it. He was injured in the lightcycle crash, when the Recos shot at us. I... I did nothing, and he died._

“But if he was injured enough to die, then there wasn't anything you could have done,” Halver argued. “You're a programmer, not a doctor.”

_Exactly,_ Kevin said, and now the words were bitter. _I'm a User. Later, Yori – Lora's program – and I were trapped on Sark's ship. She began to derezz and I saved her. I don't know how. The only thing I can come up with is that I just_ wanted _to save her so much that it happened, and I guess I must not have cared enough about Ram._

Tron looked stricken, although at which part of this, Halver didn't know. The others, having not been there, looked shocked and/or lost in varying degrees.

“No,” Halver said, trying to convey a firm, calm tone. He didn't know how well it worked as words on a screen, but he continued anyway. “You said you don't know how you saved Yori. Maybe it didn't have to do with you at all. Maybe there were other reasons, out of your control. But whatever it is, whatever spares one person and cuts down another, nobody's helped by you blaming yourself for things you can't change. Okay?”

_Maybe,_ Kevin allowed, which wasn't quite “All right,” but it was a hell of a lot better than “No.”

“You couldn't have done anything, Flynn,” Tron blurted out earnestly. “It was the-” He stopped.

_-will of the Users,_ Kevin finished, and the words looked grim and ugly. _Wasn't it though?_

Tron shut his mouth with a click and a guilty expression. Clu rolled his eyes. Halver decided it would be a good time to try and change the subject.

“What does 'derezz' mean?”

Tron almost jumped out of his circuits at the question, then stared at Halver. Well, that could have gone better.

“It means... you... stop. Stop functioning,” he said. Quorra stepped in, making Halver jump a bit. She hadn't been saying much. “He means 'die,'” she explained. “Derezzing, for a program, is like User death.”

Halver stared at her. There'd been so many casual references to one of their group derezzing another. He'd figured it was something bad, perhaps very much so, but death...! He took a breath and prepared to dig his heels in. “I want everyone to repeat after me: we will not try to solve our problems by killing or derezzing each other. It just creates more problems.”

The group looked at him like he was the one from inside a computer, but repeated the phrase dutifully, if doubtfully.

“Good,” Halver said. “Tron and Rinzler, that means that when you're angry at one another, channel that energy towards something productive, or remove yourself from the situation. Kevin-” This, directed at the screen. “-that means if something that Clu is doing upsets you, tell him about it and try to get him to change, don't just threaten to delete him. Clu, the same goes for you, only derezzing instead of deleting.” Halver turned to Quorra, Alan, and Sam, all of whom were smiling winningly at him. “The general principle still applies,” he told them. “Violence doesn't solve anything, and no one should be quick to dismiss it in others.” Sam caught what Halver was referring to and ducked his head; Alan and Quorra nodded solemnly.

_Yeah, all right,_ Kevin agreed.

Halver took a deep breath. “Now, is there anything anyone would like to talk about within the group?”

Complete silence.

Liars.

Before Halver could come up with something more or less diplomatic, a faint clunking noise filled the air instead.

_Clunk. Clunk. Clunk. Ting! Cr-chk._

Everyone glanced around, looking for the source of the noise. Quorra found it first, and walked over to the window to let said source it.

It was a flying dot. That was the first thing Halver thought of when he saw it. A flying, glowing dot. It bobbed in front of Quorra for a second, then zoomed drunkenly around the room. Quorra looked mildly curious, Clu looked affronted at its attempts to say hello, Alan was grinning like a loon, and Rinzler looked utterly captivated.

“What is it?” Halver ventured, tracking the... thing with his eyes as it flew in circles around Alan and Sam.

“It's a bit!” Alan laughed.

“Yes,” the bit said, briefly turning yellow and smoother. It zoomed over to Halver – really, there was no other word for that movement – and inspected him. He scrutinized it right back. “You're an on/off switch, aren't you?”

“Yes,” it chirped, again changing color and shape.

“Do you have a name?”

“No,” it said, and turned red and spiky.

“No, they're all just called Bit. Hey, Bit!” Sam said. Bit zoomed in front of him, and Sam pointed at Rinzler. “Go play with him.”

Halver watched silently, curious to see how this would go. Bit wavered into red for a split second, then reluctantly wandered over to Rinzler, who hadn't taken his eyes off Bit since it had come in. Well, Halver assumed not. Rinzler certainly hadn't turned his head away.

When Bit got within arm's reach, Rinzler reached up and batted playfully at it. Bit swooped out of the way and continued simply floating in place. Rinzler tried again, with more focused but similar results. This went on for a few minutes, and seemed likely to keep going for the foreseeable future.

“One of them's going to get hurt,” Halver predicted, watching Rinzler turn in circles to try and keep Bit in sight. Halver himself was remembering the bug that Rinzler had caught near the Portal, which had lasted all of half a minute. Sam shrugged.

“Nah, we've found bits before. We have to give them to Rinzler straight off, because he usually ends up 'playing' with them anyway. This way, if he derezzes the thing, nobody'll care. If he doesn't....” Sam shrugged again. “Entertainment value.” He nodded at the pair.

Rinzler's swipes were getting closer to Bit with each try, and and at last, he caught an edge of it with one hand. He looked very pleased with himself until Bit shouted, “No!” at him.

Halver had to swallow a laugh: Rinzler, in that moment, looked exactly like a scolded housecat. Halver half-expected him to puff out his fur and try to make himself look bigger. Indeed, he inhaled deeply, throwing out his chest in indignation. Bit danced forward and tapped him on the head, then skedaddled. It took about a second for Rinzler to realize what had happened, and another for him to give chase.

“Why does he act like that?” Halver asked Clu, who had made a hasty escape and was standing with the rest of the group.

“Quirk of his programming,” Clu explained. “If there's no threat for a while, he acts like... some User creature, Flynn told me once....”

_A cat,_ Kevin supplied.

“Yes, that,” Clu said. “until another threat presents itself. Rinzler's a little....” He searched for the right word as he watched Rinzler skid to a surprised stop in front of Tron when Bit hid behind the blue program. Tron twisted around, annoyed, but was stopped by Rinzler butting his shoulder with his helmet and purring loudly.

“...basic,” Clu finished, as Tron shoved Rinzler away and unsheathed his disc. Rinzler tensed and snapped down into a crouch, taking out his own disc and shaking it into a whining hum.

Halver was about to step forward and try to stop them, forgetting Sam's warning about both programs' fighting ability, when Bit darted in between Rinzler and Tron.

“No!” it said, “looking” back and forth between the two. “No.”

Neither program moved. Bit moved between them, pushing at Tron, and then Rinzler. “No,” it said again.

Tron's stance softened, looking at the bit, and, after a moment, Rinzler's did, too. Tron glanced back and forth between Bit and Rinzler. When neither seemed likely to move, he slowly straightened up the rest of the way and replaced his disc on his back. Rinzler mirrored him, ten feet away. Bit “looked” back and forth again when there seemed to be no more chance of imminent attack. “Yes,” it said. “Yes yes yes yes yes-”

“Bit?” Alan interrupted.

“Yes?” Bit asked, abandoning its post in between Tron and Rinzler and scooting closer to Alan.

“You're a miracle worker. You're staying,” Alan told it drily, and Bit zoomed off away from Rinzler, who'd apparently forgotten all about Tron, trailing “yes”es as they went.


End file.
